[ On Sunday, January 9, 2005 at 20:53:00 (-0800), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: HEADS UP: XFree86 3.3.6 has been EOLed
>
> I'm very surprised to see such a return coming from you, Greg -- of all
> the people who champion the desire to have a clean hierarchy, I'd think
> you'd be one of the most understanding of this issue.
Yeah, but my definition of "clean", in software engineering terms and
with an eye on following good software hygiene practices, is to always
build everything all the time (and ideally after every change). Ideally
it would also all be regression tested every time too.
(and that's not just my idea, and certainly not an original idea of mine
-- it's a central idea behind Aegis (devel/aegis), and it's the standard
practice in a great number of development environments, e.g. including
Plan 9; and they weren't inventing any brand new ideas either, maybe
just sometimes implementing them better than before)
In the mean time with xsrc it's clear that even with the avent of the
reach-over build in src/x11 there have been several cases now where
changes were made to the source that were never tested on some platforms
and which caused problems which persisted for quite a long time -- one
case I believe/hope I submitted a PR about was a plain old syntax error.
Maybe the releng server doesn't have the resources alone to build x11
for everything all the time, but that doesn't mean that in an ideal
world it shouldn't -- on the contrary it should, if it could, and if by
default all the many followers of -current got dist/xsrc and src/x11 all
at the same time then maybe a good fraction of them would test it all
far more often than happens now.
--
Greg A. Woods
H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com> Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>